Tom Clancy's Op-center Novels 7-12 (9781101644591)

by Clancy, Tom

  Unfortunately, not all of the communication was verbal. And none of it was encouraging.

  Father Bradbury was led onto a rug and was ordered to stand there. The man who had brought the priest in released him. Through the hood, he saw a gauzy spot of light directly ahead.

  “May I have a drink?” Father Bradbury rasped.

  The priest heard a high whistling sound from behind. A moment later, there was a sharp snapping sound followed by a blaze of intense heat behind both knees. The fire jumped up through Father Bradbury’s thighs and down to his ankles like an electric shock. He sucked a deep, involuntary breath. At the same time, his legs folded, and he dropped to his knees. When he was finally able to let the air from his lungs, he moaned miserably.

  The burning grew worse as he lay there. He knew at once that he had been struck with a switch.

  After several moments, he was hoisted roughly back to his feet and cuffed on the side of the head to get his attention.

  “Do not speak,” someone ordered.

  The speaker was standing a few feet in front of the priest. His voice was soft but commanding. Father Bradbury’s ear was ringing from the blow. He turned the side of his head toward the man who had just spoken. There was something compelling about his voice.

  “This island has been sanctified with blood of fowl and day dancing,” the man continued. “The voice of a reverend from outside the circle can only be used to advance or accept our faith.”

  The words made sense, but Father Bradbury was having difficulty concentrating on them. His legs were weak and trembling violently. He fell again.

  “Help him,” the voice from in front said.

  Strong hands moved under the priest’s arms. He was raised from the rug. This time the hands held him upright. The priest’s breath was tremulous. The pain behind his knees settled into a regular, forceful throbbing. His head, overheated and aching for water, sagged forward. The hands released him after a moment. The priest wobbled but forced himself to remain standing.

  The only sound the priest heard was his own breathing. And then, after a minute or two, the man in front spoke again. He was nearer now. Though the voice was barely more than a whisper, it was deep and compelling.

  “Now that you understand my position, I want you to do something,” said the speaker in front.

  “Who . . . who are you?” Father Bradbury implored. The words were cracked. It did not sound like his own voice.

  A moment later, he heard the terrible whistle. He cried out as he felt the bite of the switch. This time, it struck a little higher, along the backs of his thighs. The pain was so great that he actually danced forward several steps before collapsing. He fell on the dirt floor, panting and whimpering. He had a flashback to when he was a boy and had been hit with a strap by his father. This was how he sounded then. The priest lay writhing on his belly, hooting pain into the hood. He could not control what came from his mouth. His bound hands pulled against the ropes. But Father Bradbury was not trying to get free. His body had to move, to keep from letting the pain be his only stimulus.

  “You were told not to speak!” someone yelled from behind. It did not sound like the man who had brought him here. This was some other tormentor. Perhaps they had brought in someone who was proficient with a switch. Many villages had people like that, men who were skilled at corporal punishment. “Nod if you understand the instructions.”

  Father Bradbury was curled on his side. He nodded. He barely knew what he was doing anymore. His body was in agony, yet his mind was numb. His mouth was dry, but his hair and face were greasy with sweat. He was struggling mightily with his bonds yet he had never felt so weak.

  Only the priest’s spirit was intact. It had been shaped and reinforced by over two score years of reflection, reading, and prayer. He needed that part of him to stay strong.

  The switch nipped the backs of his bound hands. Father Bradbury yelped and stopped moving them. He thought of restless young boys whose knuckles he had rapped in catechism class and apologized to God. He was pulled back onto his feet. His knees folded inward, but the priest did not fall. The powerful hands continued to hold him.

  “You must believe me,” said the gentle man in front. He was leaning close again, his voice even more compassionate now. “I do not wish to hurt you. On my soul, I do not. The creation of pain is a black deed. It hurts you, and it attracts the attention of evil spirits. They watch us. They feed on evil, and they grow stronger. Then they attempt to influence us. That is not what I wish. But for the sake of my people, I must have your cooperation. There is no time to debate this.”

  Father Bradbury had no idea what this man was saying. Everything around him was confusion.

  “Now,” the voice said as the man stepped away. “You will be taken to a telephone. We have been watching your seven deacon missionaries. We have the numbers of their cellular telephones. You will call them and tell these men to leave my country. When their departure has been confirmed, you will be permitted to leave our camp. Then you, too, will leave our Botswana. You and the other priests of a false divinity.”

  “He is not false,” Father Bradbury said.

  The clergyman braced for a blow that did not come. Then it came, just as he was relaxing. It struck his lower back. He felt the shock of the blow race up his back to his neck, and he whimpered loudly. No one said anything. There was no need. He knew the rules.

  The hands holding Father Bradbury were joined by another set of hands. They pulled the priest forward. He could not keep his wounded legs under him. He did not even try.

  The priest was dragged across the room. His legs were screaming, but he could do nothing to quiet them. His head was throbbing as well, not just from the blows but from thirst and hunger. One set of hands pushed him onto a stool. The edge of the seat brushed his leg where he had been hit. It burned terribly, and he jerked away. The men settled him back down. Another man untied the bottom of the hood. It was lifted to just above the priest’s mouth. As warm as the evening was, the air felt wonderfully cool on his face.

  “There is a speakerphone in front of you,” said someone close to Father Bradbury. This was the man who had originally captured him. “The first person we are calling is Deacon Jones.”

  No one was holding the priest now. He slumped forward slightly, but he did not slip from the stool. His feet were spread wide, and his hands were still bound behind him. His arms served as a counterbalance to keep him from falling. His legs and hands burned furiously where he had been struck. His arms shook. Tears slipped from the edges of his eyes. His parched lips were trembling. He felt violated and forsaken. But Father Bradbury still had one thing neither pain nor promises could take from him.

  “You will tell him to return to the church, collect his belongings, and go home,” his captor told him. “If you say anything else, we will end the call, and you will be beaten.”

  “Sir,” Father Bradbury croaked. “I am . . . Botswanan. So is . . . Deacon Jones. I will not tell him . . . to leave.”

  The switch came down across his slender shoulders. The heavy blow snapped the priest erect and bent him backward. His mouth flew open, but he made no sound. The pain paralyzed his vocal cords and his lungs. He sat there frozen, arched away from the telephone. After a few seconds, the little air that was left in his lungs wheezed out. His shoulders relaxed slowly. His head fell forward. The pain of the blow settled in as a now-familiar heat.

  “Do you need me to repeat the instructions?” the man asked.

  Father Bradbury shook his head vigorously. Shaking it helped him to work through the aftershocks of the blow.

  “I am going to punch in the number,” the man went on. “If you do not speak to the deacon, then we will have no choice but to go after him and kill him. Do you understand?”

  Father Bradbury nodded. “I still . . . will not say . . . what you want,” he informed the man.

  The priest expected another blow. He was trembling uncontrollably, too unsettled now to even try to pre
pare for it. He waited. Instead of striking him, someone retied the hood under his chin. Then he lifted the prisoner to his feet. His legs seemed to be disconnected, and the priest began to drop. The man grabbed the meat of his upper arms and held him tightly. It hurt, but not as much as the rest of him.

  The priest was dragged back outside. He was taken to another structure and tossed roughly inside. His hands were still tied behind him, so he tucked his head into his chest to protect it from a fall to the floor. The fall never came. Father Bradbury struck a corrugated metal wall and bounced back toward the door. He landed against metal bars that had been shut so quickly they literally pinned him to the wall. His legs were still wobbly, but that did not matter. His body sagged but did not drop. There was no room. He tried to wriggle to the left and right, but that was not possible. The side walls were as far apart as his aching shoulders.

  “Lord God,” he murmured when he realized he was in a cell, a cell so small that he would not be able to sit, let alone sleep.

  Father Bradbury began to hyperventilate through the hood. He was frightened and rested his cheek against the metal. He had to calm himself, get his mind off his predicament, off his pain. He told himself that the man who had been leading this action, the man in the hut, was not an evil man. He could feel that. He had heard it in his voice. But Father Bradbury had also heard strong determination. That would cloud reason.

  The priest folded the fingers of his bound hands. He squeezed them together tightly.

  “Hail Mary full of grace the Lord is with Thee,” he muttered through the damp cloth.

  In the end, only the body dies. Father Bradbury would not stain his soul to save it. But that did not stop him from fearing for the lives of his friends the deacons, from acknowledging that he had no right to sacrifice them.

  Yet he also feared for his adoptive home. Only one group spoke of white and black magic. A group as old as civilization and terrifying to those who knew of the pain black magic could cause. Not just supernatural magic, but dark deeds such as drugging, torture, and murder.

  A group that had the power to subvert the nation and the continent. And then, possibly, the world.

  EIGHT

  Washington, D.C. Tuesday, 5:55 P.M.

  It was Mike Rodgers who informed Bob Herbert of Paul Hood’s proposed new intelligence unit. The general had come to Herbert’s office and briefed him about the meeting with Hood. Then he went off to contact the personnel he hoped would join his new unit.

  Bob Herbert was not happy when he heard about it. He was pretty sure he understood why Hood did this the way he had. Rodgers had lost Striker twice. First in Kashmir, then in a wood-paneled office on Capitol Hill. The general needed something to get him back on his feet. The combination of briefing, pep talk, and eye on the prize seemed to have done that. Rodgers had been upbeat when he came in to talk to Herbert.

  But Herbert was the intelligence chief. Hood should have consulted him. Herbert should have been briefed about this new unit at the same time that Mike Rodgers became involved.

  Hood did not speak to Herbert about the new undertaking until after the routine five P.M. intelligence briefing. The briefings were held at both nine in the morning and again at five P.M. The first briefing was to keep Hood abreast of activities in Europe and the Middle East. Those regions had already been active for hours. The second meeting was to cover the day’s intelligence activities involving Op-Center as well as events in the Far East.

  After the fifteen-minute update, Hood regarded the Mississippi-born intelligence chief.

  “You’re upset, aren’t you?” Hood asked.

  “Yeah,” Herbert said.

  “About Mike’s new operation.”

  “That’s right,” Herbert replied. “Since when is my input a threat?”

  “It isn’t,” Hood told him.

  “For that matter, since when is Mike’s ego so delicate?” Herbert asked.

  “Bob, this had nothing to do with letting Mike ramp this thing up on his own,” Hood assured him.

  “What then?” Herbert asked indignantly.

  “I wanted to keep you clean,” Hood said.

  “From what?” Herbert asked. That caught him off guard.

  “From the CIOC,” Hood said. “My sense of what they decided last night was to try to push Mike to resign. Senator Fox and her allies can’t afford public hearings, and they don’t want Mike around. He’s a loose cannon who gets things done. That doesn’t work in their bureaucratic worldview. The solution? Terminate his primary responsibility. That gives him a disciplinary kick in the ass, and it leaves him without much to do.”

  “Okay. I’ll buy that,” Herbert said.

  “So I had to give Mike something else to do,” Hood said. “If I had made it part of your intelligence operation, that would have given the CIOC a new avenue to attack us. They could have gone after your budget, your personnel. What I did was give Mike responsibilities that fulfill both the CIOC action and his own job description. If Senator Fox decides she isn’t happy with what I’ve done, and they question you about it, you can honestly tell them you had nothing to do with it. Your job or your assets can’t be attacked.”

  Herbert was still pissed. Only now he was angry at himself. He should have known that Hood had a reason for doing what he did. He should never have taken it personally.

  He thanked Hood for the explanation. Then Herbert returned to his office to do something constructive rather than brood. Emotion was a quality intelligence operatives were trained to avoid. It fogged the brain and impeded efficiency. Since he had taken an office job, Herbert often forgot that. One of the first questions Hood had asked Herbert before hiring him was a good one. Herbert and his wife had been working for the CIA when they were caught in the Beirut embassy blast. Hood wanted to know whether Herbert would trade information with the terrorists who had destroyed his legs and killed his wife.

  Herbert said that yes, he would. Then he had added, “If I hadn’t already killed them.”

  If Herbert had thought this through, he would have realized that Hood was trying to insulate him. That was what the professionals did. They looked out for their people.

  Herbert had just returned to his office when the desk phone beeped. His assistant, Stacey, told him that Edgar Kline was calling. Herbert was surprised to hear the name. The men had worked together in the early 1980s. That was when the Johannesburg native first joined the South African Secret Service. They shared information about terrorist training grounds on the African coast along the Indian Ocean. The SASS was responsible for gathering, correlating, and evaluating foreign intelligence with the exception of military data. Kline resigned from the group in 1987, when he discovered that SASS resources were being used to spy on antiapartheid advocates working abroad. The operative was a devout Catholic who did not approve of apartheid or any exclusionary form of government. Kline moved to Rome and joined the Vatican Security Organization, where Herbert lost touch with him. He was a good man and a solid professional. But he had also been a very difficult man to read. He told you only what he wanted you to know. As long as you were on his side, that was fine. He never left your ass exposed.

  Herbert wheeled himself behind the desk and grabbed the phone. “Gunther Center for World Studies,” Herbert said.

  “Robert?” said the caller.

  “Yeah, this is Robert,” Herbert replied. “Is this really the Master of Ceremonies?”

  “It is,” said the caller.

  MC had been Edgar Kline’s code name. The CIA had assigned it to him when the then-twenty-three-year-old operative worked the coast along the Mozambique Channel. Kline used it whenever he called the Gunther Center for World Studies. That was a small office Herbert had set up to process intelligence information. Herbert had named it after John Gunther, the author of Inside Africa and other books that Herbert had read as a young man.

  “You know, I’ve always said the best way to start a day is saying good-bye to a new friend,” Herbert said. “Preferably
of the opposite sex. But the best way to end a day is definitely saying hello to an old one. How the hell are you?”

  “Very well,” Kline told him. “What about you?”

  There was no mistaking Edgar Kline for anyone else working in intelligence. His voice was still thick with its Afrikaans inflection. It was a unique accent, a hybrid of the English and Dutch that comprised Kline’s Afrikaner heritage.

  “I’m still cleaning up after the yakety-yak diplomats,” Herbert replied. “Where are you calling from?”

  “At the moment, from a commercial airliner en route to Washington,” Kline told him.

  “No shit!” Herbert said. “Does that mean I’m going to get to see you?”

  “Actually, while I realize this is rather short notice, I was wondering if you might be free for supper.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Yes,” Kline said.

  “If I weren’t, I would make myself free,” Herbert said.

  “Excellent,” Kline said. “I’m sorry about this being so last minute, but it’s been difficult to make plans.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Herbert assured him. “Tell me. Are you still with the same group?”

  Herbert had to be careful what he said. Kline had made a point of informing him that he was on board a commercial aircraft. That meant the phone line was not secure.

  “Very much so,” Kline answered. “And obviously, so are you.”

  “Yeah, I love it here,” Herbert informed him. “They’ll have to blast me out of this place, too.”

  There was a short, pained moan on the other end. “I can’t believe you said that, Robert,” Kline told him.

  “Why not?” Herbert asked. “That’s how they got me out of the Central Intelligence Agency.”

  “I know. But still,” Kline replied.

  “MC, you’ve spent too much time with the wrong people,” Herbert teased. “If you don’t laugh at yourself, the only option is to cry. So where do you want to meet?”